The Sportswriter

Frank Bascombe is entering middle age, divorced, and mourning the death of his young son a few years earlier. He lives in the fictional town of Haddam, New Jersey (which seems a lot like Princeton), working as a sportswriter largely from home or on the road, with the occasional commute into the City. He maintains a cordial relationship with his ex-wife, and regularly spends time with his children, although it's all still a bit awkward, as is the dating scene. This novel unfolds over a long Easter weekend. Frank takes his girlfriend Vicki on a business trip to Detroit to interview a sports figure, catches up with a friend over drinks and learns more than he wants to about the friend's life, and visits Vicki's parents for Easter dinner. show more As these events unfold, the reader learns a lot about Frank and things come to a head on Easter Sunday. When Frank is suddenly called back to Haddam to deal with a difficult situation, he has an epiphany of sorts but the book ends with Frank still in somewhat of a mid-life crisis.

This was my introduction to Richard Ford; I very much enjoyed his writing style, illuminating the small things in life in a slow, contemplative way (think Wallace Stegner or Wendell Berry). The next book in the series, Independence Day, picks up several years later and I'm interested to see what's happened to Frank in that time. show less

I bought Independence Day some time ago and was considering The Lay of the Land when a friend said I should read the whole trilogy in order so I started on The Sportswriter. I was initially drawn in by the writing style: informal, slightly comic, completely honest. This is one of the most interesting novels of “everyday life” I can think of; it’s also a novel that gives me real insights into how men think. I’ve never got into Updike’s Rabbit novels, figured they must appeal primarily to men, but this one did interest me.Frank Bascombe became a sportswriter when he reached a point in his writing career—he’d published one book of stories—when he decided he didn’t have enough to say. It was a compromise that he accepted show more whole-heartedly. He’s not exactly gung ho, but he takes his job seriously. He also doesn’t let it define him, preferring to live in a small New Jersey town rather than in New York, to choose the sports he writes about, and not be defined by his job.The action takes place on an Easter weekend, when he meets his ex-wife to visit the grave of their son, and plans to have Easter dinner with his girlfriend, a divorced nurse named Vicki. He also meets with a man from his divorced men’s group, someone he doesn’t know well but who adopts him as his “best friend”. The guy is stressed out because, while his ex-wife went to Bimini with her man friend, he went home with another man and had sex with him and can’t reconcile himself to what he did. There are some flashbacks: Frank’s divorce, the death of his son, college in Ann Arbor where he met his wife, conversations with a palmist, a Detroit trip with Vicki to interview a ballplayer now confined a wheelchair. Throughout Frank is self-effacing, philosophical, warm, decent and humane. By the end of the weekend Vicki has dumped him (after punching him out) and his friend from the divorced men’s group has committed suicide and left the note for him. At loose ends on Easter night he boards the train on a whim and goes to his Manhattan office where a young female intern turns up in his office and he starts a relationship with her. In the weeks following everything changes, but Frank seems still the same decent guy.Now I’m definitely going on to Independence Day and The Lay of the Land. This is one interesting guy. show less

Frank Bascombe claims to be a literalist. But he might better be described as a fabulist, constantly lying to himself and others, inventing life histories for chance acquaintances (which mostly turn out to be far from accurate), and struggling to reassert his personal narrative in the face of his oldest son’s death two years previous, his inconsistent actions since that time, and the end of his marriage. He exists, often, in a dreamlike state, muddled and meandering, often overtly acting at cross-purposes with his best intentions. By contrast, what he admires in the athletes about whom he writes is that they can be within themselves, in the moment, totally fixated upon the task at hand. He aspires to that level of unconcern with his show more surroundings, his past, and his future. But Frank was never an athlete even in college, and in the end it is his words that must see him through.

It takes some time to get to know Frank, not least because of how poorly he knows himself. He praises mystery—in life, in people, and in circumstance—and says he wants to preserve it, yet he is the consummate explainer, filling in all the details of a person’s life even when, in most cases, he has to invent it. He himself is unclear about what he means by mystery. Perhaps it has something to do with the son for whom he is entombed in mourning. Perhaps it has something to do with his persistently spouting proposals of marriage, but never in such a way that they could be taken seriously. He is a man divorced from his wife, from the politics of his time, from his own family history. He seems to be adrift in a sea of suburbs and insubstantial, place-holder, accommodations, that can neither substitute for the absence of community nor inspire hope for the future. His monthly gentlemen’s club for divorced men might easily be a model for all of our modern relations—insincere, uncommitted, grasping after distractions in order to avoid the real issues and emotions that are thundering down upon us. The very distractions in which the sportswriter specializes.

Ford’s writing here is deft and subtle. Frank Bascombe is a man of words, by nature and by profession. But what purpose do his words serve, either when he was a short story writer, or in his career as a sportswriter? He claims that with his sportswriting he is doing about all a man could hope to do in addressing the problems of family, community, nation, even life itself. But he doesn’t really believe it, does he? He is a man hiding from himself, perhaps, and his real fear may be the literal truth he cannot face.

This is no novel to be raced through. It needs to be savoured, maybe even mellowed by age. I’m not sure I would have liked it as much had I read it more than twenty years ago, when it was first published and when I was more than twenty years younger. Reading it today, it felt entirely apt. Certainly, long before the end I had reached the conclusion that Ford is a writer more than worthy of the effort. I would gladly read this novel again. And anything else Richard Ford has going. Highly recommended. show less

This was a lonely book about a lonely man who does and says things that you disagree with. Sadly many of these things you have either contemplated saying (or doing) or have already done yourself. In contrast, Ford makes Bascombe into a caring and intuitive character who catches himself from saying something to spare a persons feelings only to ruin it by asking them to hop into bed moments later. Frank Basombe is one of the truest human beings i have found in literature.

The book mostly takes place over the course of three days. The last day, Easter Sunday seems endless. Many things happen happen to poor Frank Bascombe that day, any one of which would probably ruin my day. Frank however soldiers on saying misplaced or inappropriate show more things. I am sure that some readers will find him to be a cad but I related and constantly felt sorry for him and his decisions.

We are told early on that,

We should all know what is at the end of our ropes and how it feels to be there.

I don't know that I am ready for a personal visit to the end of my rope let alone seeing how it feels to be there. I'll let Richard Ford handle that. Frank Bascombe will be a character that will stay with me especially when I realize that what I have said or done was foolish. show less

Frank Bascombe is seriously depressed and he is not handling things at all well. Following the tragic death of his young son, he has fallen into an extended malaise—or a bout of “dreaminess” as he calls it—that has led to several meaningless affairs, the dissolution of his marriage, and a growing disenchantment with the magazine writing job he turned to after giving up on his career as a novelist. In The Sportswriter, we follow Frank’s life over an eventful Easter weekend just before his 39th birthday when both his resolve and some of his closest relationships are severely tested.

The fact that I liked this book despite finding the main character to be mildly repellent can only be testimony to the strong writing and show more story-telling skills of the author. This is the first of Ford’s novels that I have read—in fact, it is the first of the so-called “Bascombe Quartet,” followed by Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank With You--and I was impressed with his insight into the human condition, at least as it pertains to the plight of a middle-aged, affluent male living in New Jersey during the 1980s. Without being overly sentimental, the author manages to empower Frank with an odd sense of optimism and resilience that carries him forward despite the various setbacks he faces, many of which are of his own design. I would guess that this is not subject matter that will resonate with every reader—a lot of women, for instance—but it did with me. I look forward to reading the other volumes in the series to see what Frank does next. show less

So I finished it early yesterday evening. Read some LT reviews, then to bed. Got up at 4AM to pee; then, lying in bed an hour thinking about Frank Bascombe before able to sleep-- unless it was a dream. Reviews cited Updike, but is Rabbit so introspective? Seems more reminiscent of Fred Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, maybe with the late Ralph equivalent to Exley’s drinking issues. X (wife) maybe an Exley shout-out?
Read Ford’s Rock Springs short story collection before Sportswriter. Two comments on technique. Signature effect in RS stories was lack of explicit resolution, so not really expecting Sportswriter to have a dramatic-emotional moment in the final chapter (i.e. some Portrait of a Lady-like set piece on the death of Ralph). Not show more really being fair to James; the literal end of Portrait is about as open as you can get; but Ralph though. If you haven’t read Ford before, be warned. Second, whereas the voice in Henry Esmond or David Copperfield is plain spoken (for its time), Ford’s prose is so flamboyantly stylish it telegraphs the unreliable narrator a little too heavily: what sportswriter comes up with elegiac sentences like “At the far end of the ‘new part’ a small deer gazes at me where I wait. Now and then its yellow tapetums [look that one up Sports Illustrated readers] blink out of the dark toward the old part, where the trees are larger, and where three signers of the Declaration of Independence are buried in sight of my son’s grave.”?
Surely the voice of Frank is not Ford with its casual period racism, classicism, sexism, ethnic bigotry, and homophobia, suburban (not vulgar) in its diction and attitude. Hard not to notice that the voice goes out of its way to identify every “Negro” encountered in Frank’s three day non-epiphany for example; the voice belongs to a white male who takes for granted he is attractive to women of all ages, owns a home in a genteel suburban enclave, has a flexible job writing (apparently with no deadlines) and plenty of expense account travel. Some LT reviewers are repelled as an unconscious recognition of their own implicit negative stereotyping, but what may be most uncomfortable is Ford’s examination of the psychology of loss; the double bind of the need to go on but only with a certain absence of empathy which we suspect and fear is essential party of our identity. I will exclude the minority of readers who feel the concern with empathy is unmanly, like a man who can’t take a punch.

Note:not planning to rate until the rest of the quartet is done (read). show less

Photo of the American novelist - Richard Ford

Part of the Vintage Contemporaries Series, Richard Ford’s 1986 novel, The Sportswriter, is about a divorced 38-year old suburban New Jersey writer who lives out the American dream gone sour. In some ways the story reminded me of Camus’s The Stranger. What I found particularly disturbing about the first-person narrator and main character, Frank Bascombe, was the way Frank would always project motives, backgrounds, ideas and futures onto all the people he encountered -- family, friends, strangers. It didn’t matter who you were, if you came within the view of Frank Bascombe, you were in for a layering of categories. Frank even layered his categories onto neighborhoods, towns, cities, show more regions and countries. It was a kind of poison.

The other disturbing thing about Frank was the way he would always tell you, the reader, that what he said to people was not what he really felt or what he really thought. In other words, Frank was incapable of saying what he meant or meaning what he said. Talk about living in a kind of hell.

At one point in the novel, Frank tells the reader the divorced men’s club, where he is a member, is composed of men who are all Babbitts, himself included. Reading Frank’s admission, I ask the question: Is life so suffocating that people can’t escape their current trap, even when they can see it as a trap? What a commentary on modern life. Frank Bascombe as a modern day Babbitt, incapable of change. To me, this sounds like a life sentence. show less